South Asia Forum for Education Development South Asia Forum for Education Development

About Us - OverView

The South Asian Forum for Education Development (SAFED) is an education forum for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Education and learning is a powerful platform, to recognize and celebrate diversity across and within borders. SAFED is a forum to foster policy dialogues between public sector, civil society organizations and private sector working jointly for learning solutions to reduce poverty through quality education for all.

SAFED was proposed at the Alliance for Education Development (AfED)'s conference, entitled "Local Governance Texts and Contexts: Perspectives from South Asia" held in February 2006 in Lahore, Pakistan. It was officially launched on February 2, 2006 and was endorsed by the Minister of Education, Government of Punjab, present at the Conference as the Chief Guest.

MISSION
Creating an active South Asian learning and experience exchange corridor in education and its common challenges for the region.

GOALS
SAFED has been established to:
i) Seek contemporary and contextually relevant solutions to critical education bottlenecks to realize quality education for all.
ii) Generate world class body knowledge as valuable intellectual capital for sharing across the region and the world.
iii) Provide healing through knowledge and experience based border crossings for humanity (children, youth and adults) engaged in rethinking of education and learning as a lifelong (sustainable) and non discriminatory fundamental human right.

OBJECTIVES
-> To promote regional partnerships for learning and policy solutions.
-> To create a critical mass for education discourse and policies for education, learning and active citizenship in South Asia.
-> To build capacities of public sector and civil society organizations to develop, manage, and implement education policies.
-> To promote research, indigenous knowledge systems, sharing of experiences and successful implementation strategies.
-> To build linkages between research and practice to inform policy and timely access to information for decision makers.
-> To accelerate implementation of nationally-driven education policies, programs through hybrid synergistic solutions for girls education, linkages of higher & basic education, local governance, sustainable development, eliminating child labor through education, promoting Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for EFA, meeting access and quality through public private partnerships, fostering cross country researches, and other areas of mutual interest
-> To improve quality of data available for decision making to meet national and international targets/goals.
-> To include rural/government teachers and critical voices of beneficiaries, i.e. children and parents.